The Brain Fart

After taking off most of the last campaign (I think I stopped playing sometime just before tier 1) I’ve returned to Battlefield Europe. I’ve returned to the Allied side of the fence this time, taking up arms as either French or British. I don’t think I’ll join, or re-join, any squads right now. I want the freedom to play whatever side I want whenever I want. That’s not to say I won’t run with a squad or participate in a squad-led attack or defense, though. I’ve been in some good fights the last couple of nights, in Le Roche, Kalmthout, Bergen Op Zoom… just to name 3 of ‘em. I was going to stay out of the game until either I got my new system built or TOEs got in-game. But, it’s taking too long for either of those options and I’ve been jonesin’ for some killin’…

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The adventure begins…
I’m going to start putting together a new system over the next few months (don’t have anything like the resources to do one all at once!). One of the great things about doing this is I can canabalize parts from my current PC to build the next one. My plan is to get a motherboard and 2GB of RAM to start. If I stick to Intel CPUs I should be able to use my current CPU until I can afford one of the core 2 duos.
I want to, as much as I can, tailor this system to WWIIOL but still be able to mete out pwnage in other games.

I’ll detail the build here, so those intrepid souls who accidentally fall upon my blog may be entertained for at least a moment before moving on to what they were really searching for…
Relevant tags for this post:
Games, WWIIOL, Battleground Europe, Computers, Hardware
posted by Rob Nolan at 11:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

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I was checking up on SWG’s progress (or lack thereof) tonight, when I ran across this post by a player named Xendin. It’s actually two posts, but the thread was deleted soon after I started reading it, I wasn’t able to get past page one of the thread. Lucky for me I still had the window open so I could preserve this gem:

Sony Online Entertainment
In cooperation with New Line Cinema
Are pleased to present the future of MMORPGs!!!

SNAKES ON A PLANE: ONLINE

Join the eternal struggle of hapless human passengers against those slithery SNAKES that have somehow infestedthe plane!Fast paced, iconic, “Snakes-on-a-Planey” style action!

Customize your player, choosing appearance, clothing, and one of 9 iconic character classes:

FBI Agent – Just like Samuel L. Jackson, you are undercover to protect the passengers from a possible SNAKE outbreak!

Flight Attendent – Use your skills to operate drink carts and help the passengers remain calm! And make sure they use those seat belts!

Airline Pilot – Think flying a plane is easy?Just try and fly it with SNAKES on board!

Kung Fu Expert – SNAKES could attack at any time, and you can’t have weapons on board… so use your fists to teach those reptiles a lesson!

Passenger – Use your power of contortion to fit into those tiny seats, but keep yours eyes open… the SNAKES are after you!

Crocodile Hunter – You were raised in the outback and you like to wrestle reptiles for no real purpose.But can you handle SNAKES?Maybe charm a SNAKE and use it against your human foes!

Entertainer – Dance and play music to help inspire the passengers to rally against the SNAKES!

Smuggler – Try to smuggle illegal goods on the flight, but the SNAKES and FBI Agents are hot on your tail (smuggling ability will be implemented at a later date)

Snake – YOU ARE THE SNAKE!Choose from a multitude of SNAKES, pythons, anacondas, cobras and many more!SNAKES for some reason… and they really don’t like them on their airplanes!

Chuck Norris – When you have killed 50,000,000 SNAKES you have a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of unlocking this secret 10th profession! Impress the newbs with your invinsible god-like power to kill anything and anyone in the game just by clicking on them!

Experience the greatest Snakes on a Plane story ever told… yours!

SNAKES ON A PLANE: ONLINE

Chapter 9.7 Publish Notes, November 6th

The Battle for Row 34
* For the first time ever your actions determine the fate of the flight! The battle is heating up in row 34, seats A, B, & C and the increased activity points to a big battle on the horizon.
Choose your faction and be part of this epic event by helping the humans gain advantage over the SNAKES, or by aiding the SNAKES in their efforts to turn the tide! The conflict begins soon.

Combat
* Snake Bite: Power has been increased.
* The damage done by Critical Snake Hits that do venom related Damage-Over-Time (DoT) damage has been reduced.
* Effectiveness of ANTI-VENOM has been reduced.
* Fixed an intermittent issue that would prevent some players from being able to login to FLIGHT 237 and FLIGHT 982.

Player Seats
* Fixed an issue that prevented players from removing items from their seat pouches when the tray table was down.

Profession Respec
* The Profession Counselor (Respec NPC) will no longer allow SNAKES to respec to CHUCK NORRIS class.

Profession: FBI Agent
* Accuracy of Agents sidearm has been reduced so that they no longer hit SNAKES with every attack.
* Agents can no longer shoot SNAKES through solid objects.

Profession: Airline Pilot
* Fixed an issue where airlines pilots could not fly a Boeing 777 even if they had the proper certification.
* Activating the windshield wipers should now properly removes snakes obstructing the cockpit view.

Profession: Chuck Norris
* Due to player input (whinning and crying), the Chuck Norris class will be made a starting profession.
* Power of Chuck Norris has been greatly reduced to balance the game.
* Players who had unlocked Chuck Norris prior to Chapter 9 publish will receive an exclusive shiny trinket.

As far as the progress of SWG, I see the devs have gone back to their old ways of ignoring the player community, talking down to them or at them rather than to them. How surprising. The addition of player bounties sounds exciting, but it seems combat is still a twitchy affair (which would not be different, really, from World War II Online: Battleground Europe). So, no real progress to speak of.

Relevant Technorati tags for this post: Star Wars Galaxies, Games

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I downloaded and ran Prime95 (not the stress test) and after about 3 hours my system choked and gave me the nv4_dsp BSoD. I ran 3DMark03 rather than 3DMark06, it passed the first test fine, had serious stutters and FPS issues in the second test, and puked on the third test. Rather than BSoD on the third test, though, I got an error saying th nv4.sys file had stopped working properly and I needed to reboot, then the system froze (total hard lock in WinXP Pro SP2).
So, I have re-unsubscribed from Battleground Europe for the time being. I’m not sure at this point if just getting a new gfx card will work, or if I just need a new system. I think it’s possible things may be overheating in the case. The computer is not in an ideal place for airflow. Unfortunately, I don’t have any place else to put it at the moment.
Wish I had a way to monitor temps inside my case.

Relevant Technorati tags for this post: Battleground Europe, Games, Nvidia, Computers

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Bummer.
I had a blast with the Welcome Back Soldier program. Killed many grey things and got killed by many grey things, too. But, just as the WBS was ending, and co-incindentally just after I resubscribed, I started getting massive lag spikes, crashes to desktop, and system reboots. This made the game unplayable, and has been like this for the last 2 weeks. At first I thought it was a connection issue, but then noticed I had the same problem in both online and offline modes. If it were purely a connection issue, I would not have the problem in offline mode.
I have narrowed the problem down to some kind of timing issue with my video card and the game. What will happen is about 1 minute after I spawn into a mission my screen will freeze. Sometimes it will recover (all the trees and grass will disappear, then come back) for a few seconds before freezing again. It may do this one or two more times, but eventually it will freeze for about 2 minutes then reboot my system. I set WinXP so that it would not automatically reboot on system failure and found a BSoD saying that the video card was stuck in an infinite loop and pointing at the nv4_dsp.dll file.
I have found this to be a relatively common issue with NVidia video cards and random 3D accelerated games. According to MS (Q314215) this is an issue that requires a video driver update. I already had Nvidia’s 91.31 drivers, but I found and installed the 91.33 drivers, but had the same problem. I found another MS article (Q293078) which says essentially the same thing: update your video drivers. But, this article did suggest this could be a hardware issue.
First thing I did was uninstall the game and completely remove my video drivers (Driver Cleaner Pro), restart the system then re-install the latest NVidia drivers, the game, and DirectX 9.0c. No change.
So, I ran the Dell 32-bit diagnostics that came with my computer (4 years ago!), and it passed all tests with flying colors. Well, that’s not true. My primary HDD came up with 1 bad block. Next I ran chkdsk /r to repair the bad sectors on the hdd, that went off without a hitch. So, I defragged my HDDs and made sure I had all the most recent drivers (video: Nvidia 91.33, sound: Santa Cruz v. 4193 final, system board: Intel 82850 4.04.1007). I also updated my BIOS from version A05 to A09.
No change.
I disabled video acceleration completely, the game would not even load. I reduced the acceleration to the point where the game would still load. The mouse moved faster and my FPS seemed to improve a bit (strange, that…), but still got freezes and reboots.
Next, I downloaded and ran memtest86, it made 3 passses though all tests with no problems. I’m currently about to run Prime95′s torture test and will then download and run 3DMark’06 to put my video card through the wringer. However, I will be surprised to find an actual hardware failure on my system. I can accept it if one is found, but I feel this has to do with the way Battleground Europe 1.23.6 is programmed. Interesting, though, how the problem only started 2 weeks after the patch was released…
Either way, if I cannot find some resolution to this problem, either on my end or CRS’s, I am going to re-unsubscribe from this game. I cannot afford to pay for a game I cannot play and enjoy.

Blogger does not support catagories, so I’m going to try out something suggested on the technorati website: blog tagging.
Relevant tags for this post: Battleground Europe, Games, Nvidia, Computers

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